1983 Topps Tony Gwynn #482 PSA-10...Smashing Record Price in Memory Lane Auction (MLA)
mintonlypls
Posts: 2,473 ✭✭✭✭✭
Previous record for a PSA-10 was ~$4800. Currently with the auction closing tonight...a PSA-10 Topps Tony Gwynn #482 is at $8070 with 20% Buyer's Premium in a MLA! That is a significant jump in price...
Full disclosure...I do not own one.
mint_only_pls
1
Comments
Crazy!
It almost feels like worth a shot at opening some '83 Topps boxes to pull one of the top 3. I know my sets have some nice examples, but none of them would exceed a 9 in today's complex grading environment. Still, what a thrill it would be to land a Gem Mint 10 just like old times.
$$$$ things going up fast...I self graded one a few years ago. I agree with my buddy Elmago that it would take an act of congress to get a 10 nowadays. There are nearly 800 of them though.
The Boggs is the one to have. only 450 of those. tough to find one centered.
I'm confident that if you send in enough 9s you'll get a 10.
that is a crazy price!!! hard to believe $8k. I follow brady rookie prices fairly closely and they have been on fire as well.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
i did not realize there were 800 Gwynn 10ś. $8k is a big price with a pop that high. I guess i should have bought one years ago.
being a NE guy, I did buy a Boggs in PSA 10 years ago. perhaps I should start following the price on that one!!
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
Somebody already pointed out that there are only 747 10's of that card. So you have to pick one up on the rare occasion they come up for auction...sarcasm alert.
I just noticed a couple days ago that eBay is putting the PSA pop report in every listing that contains a PSA graded card. I wonder what that is going to do to the market.
I eyeballed the Gwynn which finished at over 8K. I consider myself to be a very conservative and harsh critic, so I will mention that although the example being discussed here presents very well, it has a visibly choppy bottom border. Other much nicer examples have sold recently for half that price.
1983 unopened product should only go higher with hammer prices like these.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
This should come crashing somewhere into the Indian Ocean. Just give it some time….
Wow, crazy for a '83.
This is a perfect result of the tight grading. There's no way that card should be so expensive or that there should be so few 10s in existence.
This might also be the reason grocery packs have almost tripled in value in about 5 years.
I have one of those but I bought it back around 2015. Now I wish I'd bought about 20 more...
I dont feel too surprised. If you pay attention to how cards are selling and appreciating in the Pokemon space you see a 3 or 4-year-old card with POP 11,000 and plenty of unopened remaining and its going for 1300. You wait two months and its going for 1700. I am concerned that some of the people investing in that space did not go through the 100 card lot days of Gary Sheffield and John Olerud RCs where one day everybody woke up and said there is too much of this, I am not paying that price.
You look at some stocks and they are going up 100 to 200% since early April. Bitcoin up 100% since last October.
I think when you compare all the possible ways you can invest money and look at how impressive of a career Tony Gwynn had and played for one team his whole career without any major controversy, 8K for his POP 700 card maybe isnt too expensive.
U - great post and things are going to better and better..
They may be better if I had one of them 83 Gwynns in a PSA 10. I do have the 85 Topps in a 10. Unfortunately just about 2% of the value of the 83. Did buy an 83 Topps vending box from BBCE at a National many moons ago and pulled a Gwynn. But it had something like 97/3 centering. Have some 90s Bowman Chrome Refractors in PSA 9 and PSA 10. In no rush to sell any of his cards.
With that many 10s, this would be a card that is very easy to manipulate the price. Typically that involves a big sale at auction, a few high BIN’s get hit, then more pop up for auction. Wouldn’t be at all surprising to hear a few guys have a small stack of these and are running them up. Same as it always was.
We are definitely going to go through another major inflationary period. Whether that is ‘better’, is debatable.
The current period seems to me to be a period of "irrational exuberance." Many people seem to have the firm belief that everything will continue to increase in price, with no possibility of a retreat. While many top-tier items will undoubtedly hold value, I suspect that even a modest extended economic downturn could cause significant disruptions in the price of some items for which the population is ever expanding.
kevin
There are too many questions when it comes to this card. NUMBER 1 being. What’s the upside? Next. Why didn’t the 9s follow suit? If someone plans on buying one then all I can say is GOOD LUCK!!!
I can see the point of it maybe not continuing to go up or it going sideways. But I would say it going up to this point is justifiable.
I love Frank Viola and Willie McGee but if its them, eh, I dont know about that. Its Tony Freaking Gwynn. If you look at him as a hitter, the way scouts would evaluate a hit tool, not power and other tools, and say this guy is an 80, he is probably the best pure hitter of the last 50 years. I mean maybe it takes getting back to Ted Williams before you stop saying the best since. In 10,000 PAs he struck out 434 times. I think from 91 to 96 he had less than 20 Ks all of those years. He hit .394 and if there was no strike maybe hits .400.
I guess my point is I dont see why he cant be "that guy" where his cards are put in a higher tier category like a Nolan Ryan Walter Payton type situation where you dont see the guy with more wins or Cys or rushing yards being more valuable. The card is high in value because that is freaking Nolan Ryan. I think Gwynn belongs on a pedestal. Then I think as always its supply and demand. Its his best RC so how many people on the planet want it. More than 700. Not ruling out market manipulation. But then it just comes down to, okay if we are playing this game and the price is 8,000 do you still want it. I can see a lot of people with bank saying yes, one please. I want that.
Sure, but you think collectors just realized his greatness? What is the impetus for the card to 2x in a few weeks. The answer in these scenarios is almost always the same - manipulation.
Some cards like 63 Rose still haven’t hit the buying group peaks of 7 years ago. And many, many key cards are still WAY off 2021 peaks.
This card will likely suffer the same fate.
Oh, and of course collectors will pile in, for a while anyways. It’s why pump and dumps work. Fl
I really would like to see more than 1 sell at that price to be convinced it's a legit floor.
Watching a PSA-10 1983 Topps Gwynn RC on eBay (Probstein) closing in a week…sitting at $3800+.
prolly 8k is high but 6k looks more normal now. if it goes higher that wouldn't surprise me. look if the 1989 ud griffey psa 10 is over 4k with a pop of 4500, then the gwynn at 8k isn't unbelievable.
Trying to understand why 83 wax would go up based on the Gwynn price advance. If one was not going to open it up searching for a 10 Gwynn, it's basically the same box. And with the tight grading aspect in play, it would remain unopened for the foreseeable future. So where is the benefit if the Gwynn rose to a 20k value.
But I'm the kind of person that if I buy a vintage Corvette I would not leave it in the garage and just look at it. I'd enjoy the pleasure of driving it. Carefully of course.😀
I think its fair to say every 83 T Gwynn wont sell for 8K now. I think the sale changes the range it sells in though and the upside. June you had 3300. July 3400 4000. August 3800 4500 4800. Two days ago 4995. Then the discussed sale of 8K. So wont be surprised if we start seeing 5500 5700 6000 6200 and then 8K on the high side may eventually not seem so strange.
Feels like we go through this every so often. What? 1400 for a PSA 10 84 Donruss Don Mattingly? That is ridiculous. Then time passes and its 4000.
And right on time, another one comes to auction to lock in the gains. This one will get shill bid or bought the consignor, or both, and voila we have two sales.
Its such a simple play, all you need to do is put together a little stack of the same card, eat a few thousand dollars on consignment fees, and you can lift your stack by 50%. Just requires some cash and a lack of integrity.
1983 Topps Baseball has been, and always will be popular. There's no doubt that it ranks as one of the best of any set produced in the 80s. One aspect I've noticed with regards to the overall activity on high grade cards for the Big 3, both graded and raw, as well as other key cards, is the recent passing of Sandberg, bringing only more attention to anything associated with the set. It may stabilize sometime soon when people realize paying psycho bucks for an 80s card is kinda, well, psycho, but the set will never be less popular, nor the desire to own some of the cards. I'm glad I've kept enough of mine to enjoy viewing them at leisure, but kinda bummed I sold my Sandberg PSA 10 a couple years ago. Another one lurks in the future. Maybe. If I hit the lottery.
I always liked TG. I thought he was well spoken and he seemed like an all round great guy. With that said, his cards have been around for over 40 years. It’s highly improbable that he’s become baseballs darling within these last few years. AND all of the sudden everyone wants his PSA 10 rookie card (bypassing all the other PSA grades)….
I wish I could give a realistic price. Someone that collected this set would be able to give is a better idea of what it’s actually worth.
Years ago I bought 2 boxes of 83F for 60 a piece from BBCE.
I did a thread on the deconstruction of the set - I was surprised that I was able to complete the set with 2 boxes!
I did sub a Gwynn and came back a 10. One of the "take homes" doing the set was that I realized that the first thing I noticed when opening a pack and perusing the contents? The centering caught my eye first.
The 83T many years ago was way more affordable in a 10.
The good news is PSA only needs 1 sale to assign the grading fee. If I was PSA I would be the top bidder in all those auctions.
There you go again opening up that Pandora's Box. Crafty.
BGR - I am sure there are more than 747 that want that card, but as recently as 15 days ago, and the 9 times it has sold in 2025, they were only willing to pay 4k.
Unless someone can explain a 2x increase in 15 days - he retired 24 years ago and died 11 years ago - I’ll stick with my theory that the card is being price manipulated. And that collectors are a bunch of sheep, that will get fomo, and lock this price in and probably even build on it.
Like seriously , this card has sold 9 times this year, all range bound, and it suddenly breaks out. Ya, sure.
Is the TG PSA 10 RC price "one off" or just general trend we are seeing? (yes, we all know about the 13m MJ/Kobe card from a few weeks ago)
Here are a few more recent card sales that got "Rare Air" prices:
A 2004-05 Panini Mega Cracks Lionel Messi rookie card -- assessed a perfect 10 by card grader Professional Sports Authenticator -- was sold for $1.5 million through Fanatics Collect's fledgling private sales network.
It's the most ever paid for a soccer card, surpassing the $1.33 million paid for a 1958 Alifabolaget Pele card in a private sale in 2022. The sale comes days after Goldin Auctions brokered a private sale of $1.1 million for another copy of the card, also graded a 10 by PSA.
https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/46258113/lionel-messi-barcelona-rookie-card-sells-record-15m
A signed "Bird/Magic" RC went for 75k in PSA 8.5 (card grade)
https://bid.memorylaneinc.com/bids/bidplace?itemid=89051
I’m not sure why it pulled that in from the quote. The part about 747 of them. - I corrected it. I suspect there's a lot of manipulation going on in the market.
Those are all rare cards, that don’t come up so sale often. There should be no correlation between those sales and the Gwynn which sells often, and has been range bound.
I feel a big part of that sales price and it going from mid 3000s to high 4000s (outside of the 8K sale) is its a "risk on" environment and there was a lot of cash on the sidelines. If we are in a bear market and there is little optimism or hope then the 8K win is much more of a head scratcher.
The NASDAQ was 15,200 on April 8. Its 22,300 right now. That is a 46% uptick in 5 months. So its not Tony Gwynn, its everything. He just goes along for the ride. Someone mentioned here and I agree the line between investing in different things is staring to blur.
When I was a kid if I wanted to sell cards to buy something else I went to the card shop with my grade A stuff and got 40 to 50% of book value. Now I drive up to the Philly Show on Friday with 100 cards that are from my faves hand them to a consignor and it becomes cash quickly. It works the other way too. When things felt less certain in February and March sell stocks and the cash is in the bank account in 24 to 48 hours to pay Heritage.
I think its mostly about liquidity. It does not make it smart or a good wise value buy. It could also be market manipulation. But think its very possible at least two people have a lot of money to play with and did not think it through. Or one was a shil and the other guy was a FOMO cant miss out have to have it guy.
^^^ Liquidity and Access are major factors that are not discussed enough.